European Young Investigator Award 2024

Gabriele Lignani is Professor of Translational Neuroscience at UCL. He received his PhD in 2012 in Experimental Neuroscience from the University of Genoa and he did his first postdoc at the Italian Institute of Technology. Then he moved to UCL and was awarded a Marie-Curie individual fellowship to develop new CRISPR-based editing tools to treat epilepsy. In 2018 he started his own lab as Epilepsy Research UK Emerging Leader to further develop novel gene therapies for epilepsy. He then obtained an MRC New Investigator Award to develop new CRISPR-based technologies for Dravet Syndrome, recently an ERC Consolidator Grant, and several other discovery and translational grants.

For his research in gene therapy for epilepsy he has recently been awarded the ILAE Harinarayan Young Scientist Award, the Michael Prize 2023 for the best scientific contribution to progress in the field of experimental epilepsy and he has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. The focus of his lab is to develop gene therapy and editing techniques for neurological disorders, to study the role of homeostatic plasticity in epilepsy and understand the basic epileptic mechanisms.